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You don't want to be an animal, you want to observe your own animal functions, so as to get a mental thrill out of them. It is allpurely secondary--and more decadent than the most hide-bound intellectualism.

D. H. Lawrence

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D. H. Lawrence
Age: 45 †
Born: 1885
Born: January 1
Died: 1930
Died: January 1
Literary Critic
Novelist
Painter
Playwright
Poet
Screenwriter
Translator
Writer
Eastwood
Nottinghamshire
David Herbert Lawrence
Lawrence H. Davison
D.H. Lawrence
D. H. Lorenss
D. G. Lourens
David Herbert Richards Lawrence
D. H. David Herbert Lawrence
Observe
Bound
Hide
Bounds
Decadent
Mental
Intellectualism
Function
Secondary
Animal
Functions
Thrill

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Recklessness is almost a man's revenge on his woman. He feels he is not valued so he will risk destroying himself to deprive her altogether.
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[During the Renaissance] the Italians said, We are one in the Father: we will go back. The Northern races said, We are one in Christ, we will go on.
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Let there be an end ... of all this welter of pity, which is only self-pity reflected onto some obvious surface.
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I can't do with mountains at close quarters - they are always in the way, and they are so stupid, never moving and never doing anything but obtrude themselves.
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Necessary, forever necessary, to burn out false shames and smelt the heaviest ore of the body into purity.
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The Spanish wine, my God, it is foul, catpiss is champagne compared, this is the sulphurous urination of some aged horse.
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I am only half there when I am ill, and so there is only half a man to suffer. To suffer in one's whole self is so great a violation, that it is not to be endured.
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It always seemed to me that men wore their beards, like they wear their neckties, for show.
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The reaction to any word may be, in an individual, either a mob-reaction or an individual reaction. It is up to the individual to ask himself: Is my reaction individual, or am I merely reacting from my mob-self? When it comes to the so-called obscene words, I should say that hardly one person in a million escapes mob-reaction.
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Morality in the novel is the trembling instability of the balance. When the novelist puts his thumb in the scale, to pull down the balance to his own predilection, that is immorality.
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Death is the only pure, beautiful conclusion of a great passion.
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We do all like to get things inside a barb-wire corral. Especially our fellow-men. We love to round them up inside the barb-wire enclosure of FREEDOM, and make 'em work. Work, you free jewel, WORK! shouts the liberator, cracking his whip.
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The peasants of Sicily, who have kept their own wheat and make their own natural brown bread, ah, it is amazing how fresh and sweet and clean their loaf seems, so perfumed, as home-made bread used all to be before the war.
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There is only one thing that a man really wants to do, all his life and that is, to find his way to his God, his Morning Star, salute his fellow man, and enjoy the woman who has come the long way with him.
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Let yourself fall in love. If you have not done so already, you are wasting your life.
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For my part, I prefer my heart to be broken. It is so lovely, dawn-kaleidoscopic within the crack.
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The novel is the one bright book of life. Books are not life. They are only tremulations on the ether. But the novel as a tremulation can make the whole man alive tremble.
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But better die than live mechanically a life that is a repetition of repetitions.
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I would like [the working man] to give me back books and newspapers and theories. And I would like to give him back, in return, his old insouciance, and rich, original spontaneity and fullness of life.
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Not that the Red Indian will ever possess the broad lands of America. At least I presume not. But his ghost will.
D. H. Lawrence